[Music]
Hey everybody welcome back to Phantom Power Business Hour.
This is episode three and this is a value for value podcast.
You guys know what value for value is right?
That's where you the listener can send little tiny pieces of Bitcoin directly
to the podcast host, to the artists that you hear, to the guests that you hear on these shows.
That is the beauty of these podcasting 2.0 apps like podverse, pod fans,
curiosity, fountains, etc.
It enables that exchange of value between the listener and the host or the listener and the artist
that you do not get in the regular boring Spotify world or in the regular Apple podcast world.
That is the beauty of value for value, that is the beauty of the podcasting 2.0 apps,
the podcasting 2.0 index, which you should research, all that fun stuff.
We're going to keep preaching the gospel of value for value.
On today's show we're going to get our hands on nerdy, we're going to dive into RSS
and why it's important to the podcasting 2.0 index, why it's important to podcasting period,
why it's important for Bitcoin, why it's important for musicians.
I get a lot of questions from musicians about RSS and I thought you guys should know about it.
We'll do a separate show about Noster as well coming up.
We touch on it a little bit here, but since so many of these music broadcasting,
these podcasts are living and starting up in the RSS world,
I figured let's get some smart dudes in here who know a hell of a lot more about it than I do
and have them explain it to us.
So that's what we're going to do. We got two great guests line up.
I will scroll the music down in the background and I will shut up.
Here we go. This is a great conversation. Hope you enjoy it.
All right, welcome back. Thank you to the fabulous listeners who are joining us here
on the Phantom Power business hour.
As you heard in the intro, I am going to let my guests introduce themselves as we talk about RSS.
So let's start with the gentleman in London, sir. You have the floor.
Give us your name in a little bit of your background.
I've just lost a signal at the worst possible time, but yes, let me introduce myself.
That's what he asked. All right, so I am Doudas.
I'm the founder of RSS Blue, which is a podcast hosting company,
which might sound weird like why am I even on your show if the things we're going to talk about are music,
but one of the things I wanted to deal with RSS Blue is to bring the open standards of podcasting
and things like RSS to music. And I hope that's something we can discuss today.
Cool. All right, Chicago, you have the floor. Who are you, sir?
Hey, I'm Mitch Downey and I am the co-founder of Podverse.
And we make a open source podcast app. However, it is any kind of audio content, not just podcast.
And I've been, it's supported on iOS, Android, Web, and FDroid.
And I've been working on it like eight years, and I'm a software developer.
Damn. All right. So both of my guests are far too modest.
So David Austin London has PhD in electronic engineering and you got your bachelor's in engineering.
Is that correct? That's correct.
And you are a research fellow at University College of London. Is that correct?
That's right. I research the cybersecurity of machine learning systems.
Okay. So you're way too smart for me.
And then Mitch has his undergrad in philosophy, wouldn't it? From the University of Illinois, fighting a line, I?
Yeah, you have I, great school, not the most useful degree in a capitalist market.
But, yeah, I enjoyed my time there and it wasn't until my late 20s that I got into programming actually after being tired of being unemployed.
Yeah, I feel it. Well, and then you got your masters in instructional technology from northern Illinois, which is, which is good school.
Yeah. Okay. So my guests are far too modest. They don't like to talk about how, how smart they are. Fair enough. All right.
So fellas, let's, David, let me start with you. Just like, you know, if, if we're trying to explain RSS to dumb bass players out there and myself included.
How do we explain what RSS is and get, give me some basic examples and then Mitch, I'll give you the same question too.
Like, what is RSS? Give us some basic examples of how it's been a part of our lives for 25 years. David, of sure.
I think even a more basic question is, what is a podcast? Because that is so closely related to what we've been using RSS for.
And you know, when you ask people, what is a podcast? Most people kind of visualize a few people talking to microphones. Maybe there's a video component to it.
But that's kind of difficult to define what exactly is that because if you just say it's just a few people talking to microphones, you know, you could say that the tonight show with Johnny Carson was also a podcast.
But when you think about it, it probably wasn't. So is it maybe the internet that is the crucial component in podcasting that maybe is closer to the truth.
But again, if you look at someone like Howard Stern, he might put his show to series XM, but just because it's online doesn't necessarily mean that the Howard Stern show is the podcast.
And I guess the most important component of podcasting is the open nature of distribution of audio or any kind of media.
So podcasting emerged in the early 2000s when people like Adam Curry essentially came up with a way to distribute content in an open way.
And best way was called RSS short for really simple syndication.
The way this word essentially is you just have the simplest thing imaginable, which is like a text document, which has maybe on the one line, it says title.
And maybe on that line inside the title, you see something like the Joe Rogan experience. Then on the next line in that document, there is description tag.
And on the other line, there is a line which says enclosure, which links to just a simple NP free file, which contains the audio of the show.
And this seems very, very basic, but it's so powerful if people can agree on how to interpret this kind of format.
If everyone agrees that this is the format we're going to use to essentially define these kind of shows, it means that anyone who uses that format can distribute that in the same exact way.
And the people who want to listen to it can use those same standards to consume that content. For example, people like Mitch at podverse can use the standard to make a podcast player that knows how to ingest the Joe Rogan experience back in the old days when it was a podcast or any other podcast that uses those same kind of standards that everyone agrees to.
Okay, so that's the that's the idea behind our assess is essentially an open standard.
And if everyone agrees on that standard, where at least most parts of it, we can exchange content like media, like audio files in an open way, which gives rise to things like podcasts, which are these.
Audio shows or maybe even video shows that can be watched on any kind of device or medium that understands that format.
If you go to series XM and you try to watch the Howard Stern show, it's very, very specific format, which is only interpreted that way on that specific website.
But if I want to listen to the Lux Reven podcast, I can go to podverse, I can go to fountain or I can go to any other podcast app because they all understand how to interpret this.
Okay, so Mitch, give us some examples. That's huge, David. I thank you. Mitch, give us some examples of like how I mean, because RSS has been around for a while.
Yeah, give us some examples of how it's been part of our lives for 25 years.
RSS is the basis of blogging and also podcasting. The way I like to describe RSS is it's the simplest possible way you can distribute your content to as many apps as possible.
It is a standard that's been used. It's simply a text file. If you know nothing about programming or RSS, you can just open your RSS file.
You can see the title of your content. You can see the episode or music track titles. You can see the links to the MP3s. It's actually not very technical at all. You can open it in Microsoft Word if you want to.
And it is the basis of how you can distribute media, any kind of media in a way every app can understand easily.
So if you're an independent artist, whether it's a musician or a podcaster, you would, it just makes sense. You would want to have, here is my RSS feed. It contains all of my content information.
Any platform if you want to use it, here it is, you can grab it. And that frankly includes the big tech platforms too if they want to.
If you can imagine like as an artist, you may have to opt to Spotify and fill out forms and upload this. You may have to go to YouTube. You may have to go to rumble.
You may have to do all these different platforms. And if they accept RSS, they have all of the data they need. They could just say, oh, you know copy paste your RSS URL and we'll just pull it all in for you and handle it automatically.
So if you're a content creator, you want to make it as easy as possible to reach the largest possible audience on RSS feed is only going to help.
OK, so then. And the doubt that you briefly touched on Adam. So why don't you talk about and I'm going to ask you to the same question here.
What is the difference between podcasting of five years ago and in podcasting 2.0 now and how you got involved in working with Adam Curry.
Of course. So as with any open standard of one of the most important things is how well accepted it is. How many people and companies can you actually convince to use that standard.
And RSS has been incredibly successful in that in the span of let's say 15 years from the early few thousands when it began to be used for podcasting.
But over time, what happened was that the original specification of that standard became a bit you limited for some use cases.
So what's hard to happen is that the original RSS OK, too limited OK, exactly.
Because it is just a standard that you essentially agree on. And you have to operate within those limits if that's something you agree on.
And if you feel that there are limits, you can either try to extend that standard to add features to it or as some commercial entity started doing is maybe invent feature that only work on your own platform.
So the way podcasting ideally should work is you go to a hosting company like RSS Blue, you upload all your stuff there and it distributes automatically to all of these podcast players and they interpret the RSS feed in any way they want.
Now, what's hard to happen is that all of these platforms like Apple and Spotify started adding, you know, their platform specific features, which they felt improved the listener and creator experience.
And they often suggested that RSS was limited than it's doomed because you can't really have those features in RSS. Sure, you can't have them in the original specification, but we have ways of extending that specification.
And podcasting 2.0 is exactly this thing. So Adam Curry was the person who suggested ways of essentially moving forward with podcasting and adding new features to it in a very open way where you don't have to depend on specific platforms to essentially implement those features that only work on those specific platforms.
So one of the most important things was this discussion of how do podcasters actually make money.
And the proposal that was put forth is this kind of philosophy of value for value, which Adam Curry pioneered on his own podcast, no agenda over many, many years.
Whereas essentially you asked listeners to pay you what they think they get from the content they listened to you.
Because advertising can be very fragile, it can be very unpredictable, and you kind of become dependent on it in a sense that you may often be kind of self centering yourself just to satisfy the advertisers.
But with value for value, you're essentially building the strong relationship with your listeners where if they value the thing you produce, they will give that value back to you.
Now, of course, how do you actually kind of put that into something that is actually practical? How do you put this into a standard?
And you essentially need a way for the listeners to pay you directly. And probably the best example of how to do that right now is Bitcoin.
Yeah.
You can have a relationship where there are no middlemen between you, the creator and the listener.
And if you can use RSS for that, that's perfect. And with technologies like Lightning, which enable essentially instant payments of small amounts of Bitcoin, that's exactly possible.
And it's incredibly simple in a sense that if you have an RSS feed, what you can do now is you can embed your Lightning address, which is like the recipient of the Bitcoin in that RSS feed.
And it's going to be available to everyone to see.
And if, yeah, so it is, so it is so podcasting 2.0, essentially the difference between podcasting 2.0 and traditional podcasting is simply the store of value is simply that the introduction and value for value in Bitcoin.
Is that correct?
That's one of the major components, but it's not the only one.
So it's this component that allows you to receive money directly from the listeners. You can even have things like splits where you share the value directly with the people you create the content with.
So you don't have to have just one recipient that receives the money and then you kind of depend on that person to distribute distribute the income in a fair way.
You can actually just have a sort of contract in the feed, which does that for you.
But there are lots of other features in the podcasting 2.0 space that have introduced and maybe Mitch can expand on some of these.
Yeah, so yeah, Mitch, take it away. The floor is yours.
Sure. Well, zooming out at the highest possible level, I would call, I would say that podcasting 2.0 is making new features possible and podcasting.
Now that may seem confusing because now there is music being introduced, but it turns out that that is as simple as declaring your RSS feed is a music album.
It's a very simple change.
And we haven't seen new features like this for a long time simply because the apps and the RSS host couldn't agree upon a standard.
And they couldn't work things out and figure out, okay, we're going to add live stream support, for example, how are we going to do it?
And then they couldn't get consensus because people didn't want to play along and couldn't make it happen.
Well, Adam Curry, James Kiddland and Dave Jones have come along and they've led this movement basically of gathering all of these different app developers and RSS companies together to agree upon standards.
It turns out it's really not that difficult. I mean, it is difficult, but the solutions are quite simple and it mostly just needs people to work together in a way where they actually want to get the results.
And when you rely on the big tech platforms, they don't want to see these simple solutions that are cross platform that can work for anybody.
Yeah, that's a podcasting 2.0 and we have added many new features as a result of it. There's, as Dovidas explained, there's the live value, the value functionality so you can send Bitcoin and potentially any kind of currency through the apps you listen on.
And then there's also live streams, which is a big breakthrough for distribution.
Yeah, for sure. So how did how did each of you get involved with with Adam? I mean, you know, to anybody who dives into this world of value for value and Bitcoin and musicians sharing their music via music broadcast, you're you're going to run into Adam be it day one or hour one or week one, like sooner or later, you're going to start seeing his name. And for those of you, for those of us who like me have gray hair, we're like, oh, yeah, I know Adam from MTV days, right?
Like, so how did you guys get get involved with them?
Well, I was looking around the year 2000 or no is like late 2019. I'm an open source developer. I was looking for open source related podcasting opportunities, podverse.
We want to contribute to more than just poppers want to contribute to the open software ecosystem and I happen to reach out to James and he tipped me off that there's this new thing coming together called podcasting 2.0 and he sent me episode one before it was even live. So it was just kind of serendipity that I reached out at this time that I'm casting 2.0 is coming to fruition.
And immediately it was like, oh, these are this is what I've been looking for all these years. I was working mostly in isolation, you know, just kind of putting together the first drafts of podverse.
And, but we didn't have any connections or people to collaborate with. So that yeah, that was the introduction. I was familiar with Adam Curry a bit through other podcast and hearing people talk about him.
And then I became a listener of his podcast after that. Yeah, that's how I got in.
Cool. And David, how do you come across Adam? How do you start working with them?
So I've started our says blue in late 2021.
Because I've always been interested in our assets and I won't try something new and it seemed kind of natural to seems funny to say it's kind of natural to start a podcast.
I was in company, but at the time it kind of seemed natural. And that's what I did.
And over the next few months, I kind of built a prototype of what's the minimum necessary amount to do to essentially be able to host podcasts.
And sometimes you don't know what you don't know.
I once told my uncle about what I was doing.
And he told me about Adam Curry in podcasting 2.0. He says like, what are you crazy? You're not doing podcasting 2.0.
And it was at that time that I learned about podcasting 2.0. And you know, once you learn, you joined podcast index dot social.
You're kind of drawn into all of that. And yeah, it was kind of very accidental of how I got into podcasting 2.0.
Well, one of the things that I, you know, it's still early, I think, and what do I know? I've only been in this space for like four or five months.
But I would call even though you guys have been working on this for years, you're obviously early adapters.
And it's still early in the movement overall. And whenever it's early in a movement of any kind, the leaders of that movement tend to be open to having people help and tend to be open to communication.
I mean, once it goes mainstream, it's going to be hell of hard to get in touch with any of the leaders, just because it'll it'll have a life of its own.
But yeah, I've one of the things I've really been blown away is by how welcoming and open the entire community is RSS podcasting, no, sir, every all the big pointers in this space, like everybody is like, hey man, how can I help learn like what the questions you have?
Let me just go back over one point just to kind of clarify it is one of the questions I had for both of you is how did RSS adopt Bitcoin enlightening as a store of value as an exchange of value.
And it sounds like Adam, like that whole thing was Adam's idea is that is that an oversimplification or is that correct Mitch?
He specifically is interested in Bitcoin and driving it forward, but the reason Bitcoin has emerged as the the first value transfer, like option we have is because the Bitcoin developers are far ahead of every other technology and making Bitcoin accessible as an option to be used for this.
Hypothetically, you could use any financial processor to do value transfer, but they don't allow you to Bitcoin is created in an open source way and the whole purpose of it is to facilitate these types of transfers, especially with the lightning network, which has very low fee instant near instant transactions.
So, you know, Adam is very personally interested in Bitcoin, but it's just the option that works today. We have the technology there to do this.
Yeah. Govados, any thoughts on that question, like the origin of the merging of RSS and Bitcoin?
I agree. I mean, probably the main reason it emerges the main solution as Mitch said is probably because of the ease of how we transfer value using the lightning network.
You know, if you are not into Bitcoin, that's only fine. Once you get these atotias in your wallet, you can transfer that to the at the same day if you want to.
What Bitcoin and Lightning enables you is this first step, which is this very direct relationship between listeners and yourself where they don't have to rely on some external financial systems to make this a value transfer for you.
You can do that directly in the app and some people might not know that. If you go to podverse, you can pay creators within that app. You can, for example, stream a certain amount of satoshi every minute, if you want to, or you can make these one-time payments called boosts, which may also contain messages with them.
So I feel that is very important. It's not just that you are transferring money from your wallet to the podcast or wallet. You can also attach messages that the hosts read and maybe read them during their show.
Once you send money, once you associate money with the messages that you send, these messages tend to be just higher quality because they just allow anyone to send you messages. Most of them, you are going to ignore it.
If someone pays you 100,000 satoshi, maybe that message is quite important.
For the musicians who are listening, let me break it down and explain a little bit more what Tavidas was just saying. Also, tie in some of the things that both of my guests have mentioned so far with respect to splits.
Let's say we are listening to a music broadcast right now and we are listening to shrooms by Juffle-Out.
While that song is playing, you as a listener can be like, "Oh, that's really cool. I love the song. I am going to send just loud a thousand satoshi's."
Boom, you boost that song while it's playing and all of those, or 95% of those sets, the overwhelming majority of those sets go to just loud as the songwriter.
Now, what Tavidas and Mitch mentioned earlier is there are ways to split that on the back end. Let's say that just loud co-wrote that song shrooms with Joe Martin and Anzli Castello.
They each have a third ownership in the song. When those 1000s satos come over, boom, they equally get split between those three co-writers.
That is instantaneous for all of your musicians who are out there listening. The fact that me and Mitch and Tavidas can dig your tunes and send you Bitcoin, you get that instantaneously.
You don't get it in six months once the PRO has gone back and checked everything and then send you your mailbox money. That's point number one.
The other point is if you are listening to the show on, like Mitch's app, podverse, the listener can set it up where, "Hey, every minute that I'm streaming, that I'm listening to the show, I want to send 10 satoshis to the host."
While I'm sitting here talking and people are falling asleep at the boredom of my voice, I'm still learning sats because the listeners are sending 10 satoshis every minute. Mitch, did I get that right? Is that a good way of explaining it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So let me move in briefly. I want to ask you guys about Noster, which is an open source social media protocol. Let's just call it that. And as a musician, my primary concern is always good is what's good for the musicians, irregardless of the tech.
I understand that there are some differences with RSS and Bitcoin as an exchange of value and Noster and Bitcoin as an exchange of value.
So I'm wondering if you guys can break down maybe like a high level difference between RSS and Noster and what, you know, how musicians need to know the difference because I'm talking to musicians left, right in the center and they're like, I don't know what the hell to do with Noster.
So Mitch, I'll give it to you. Give me a high level difference between the two.
Well, I may not be the best person to explain how Noster works, but to me, they're not really overlapping in what they do and what they can solve.
An RSS feed is simply your data in a feed, which can then get pulled in to any platform or system. Noster is a distributed decentralized platform and system.
So to me, Noster can pull in RSS data and do whatever Noster things it needs to do. I don't really see the divide there, which makes it difficult for me to speak to beyond that.
But yeah, RSS is just the simplest way you get your content, make it available for any platform to consume.
Maybe Dovidas knows more than I do about specific special features that Noster can support.
Don't, I probably don't. I'm just going to say that they might be trying to solve similar problems.
And that's a good thing, you know, we probably need different approaches to things.
So Noster in an ideal world, I understand tries to do similar things as RSS, but maybe in a more decentralized way.
But of course, as with any kind of decentralization, there are a lot of problems that need to be overcome.
And at this point in time, I guess RSS is just much more mature, both in terms of the support across all kinds of apps.
And in terms of the features it has. So what RSS and podcasting people know currently have is this idea of splits that are embedded in the feed.
And that's such an important point, I guess, to kind of trust everyone.
Because RSS is about building a trustless relationship.
You know, I kind of get tired of people saying, oh, we need a new platform.
I'll go to rumble, I trust the CEO, I trust that guy.
You don't need to trust anyone if you use the right technology.
Yeah.
You know, everyone has their own faults.
Yeah, that's the allure of Bitcoin too. It's like the technology, man.
Exactly. You know, what RSS is to information Bitcoin is to money.
You build a system where you don't have to rely on the goodwill of individual people.
Yeah.
And if platforms want to adopt RSS, it kind of solves everything.
You don't even need to trust them.
You don't need to trust the apps. You don't need to trust the hosting companies.
Because if you build a system where you can easily go from one place to another if you don't like your hosting company or you don't like your podcast app, that's already possible because we rely on these open standards where the information is available for everyone to see.
I'm not exactly, if I could add to that.
So like a simple way to think of it from a creator's perspective. If let's say you're a video content creator and you've had a thousand videos you've put on YouTube over the years and you get demonetized and now you want to move over to rumble.
Well, if you were uploading your content to YouTube with an RSS feed, so all of your content was originally in your RSS feed, YouTube just pulled it in.
Then when you switched to rumble, it would be as simple as, okay, rumble, here's my RSS feed.
Go ahead and upload those thousand videos and do whatever rumble things you need to do.
This will also carry over to music.
If you share an album online and an RSS feed and one, it will be available to all the podcasting 2.0 enabled apps that exist today.
But you could also tell Spotify or Apple music or Napster or whoever is around these days.
Here's my RSS feed. Here's my content. I don't want to go through all of your forms and fill this out and upload this and do all this manual work.
I've already created it in a way you can understand. Here's my RSS feed.
I think it's just a good place to center yourself as a creator to have an RSS feed that has all of your content.
If the big tech platforms don't adopt it, well, there's this long tail of all these other apps that will.
I think, frankly, they may adopt it over time if artists are just insisting on it and say, hey, I don't want to keep jumping through all these hoops through these different platforms.
Here's my content. It's in a standard file. Just take it.
Yeah, I think it's going to be interesting because I think somebody is there is going to be a musician who is going to go mainstream from this space.
And it's going to force the hand of the PROs and the record labels and everything like that with respect to not only just Bitcoin sovereignty but RSS sovereignty.
And to a certain extent, noveran, noster sovereignty as well because for those musicians who are listening, noster, think of noster as another social media platform where with RSS, you have to be actively engaged and subscribe to the different shows on podverse or fountain or wherever with noster.
If it, think of it like social media and it's all open source, there's absolutely no censorship. There's no high garden walls. So you're going to see some things on there that you don't personally agree with, but it's completely censorship free.
And as an artist or a creator or musician, you're going to need to be posting in that space in the same way that you would be posting on Facebook or TikTok or things of that nature.
It's just, but just know that it's completely open source. There's no censorship. And that has its good and bad points, you know, because maybe as an artist, you don't want to be seen right next to some content that you don't agree with personally, but it is what it is.
It's open source and it's, you know, there's no censorship to it.
But I'll do a separate show on noster. Let's get back over to RSS here real quick to either one of you. And I guess that David, I'll start with you.
Where do you see it, see it going with respect to music broadcasting? I mean, right. You know, just with RSS in general. What's next for it?
So I guess it might be useful to the listeners to give a quick overview was the status quo with regards to music.
So you already mentioned that we have this idea of marking some of these RSS feeds as music, which essentially means that artists can upload their music, their albums.
As an RSS feed and these can be listened on all apps that support this format. And then we have another amazing thing, which is this idea of music shows where you can imagine this like a music radio show where DJ plays other people songs.
And mentioned when that song plays, you can actually redirect the payments from listeners to the artist. So that's what we call wall switching.
So that's incredibly exciting, but I feel in the next at least few months.
This idea of music in RSS is going to mature because when we started doing music in broadcasting, we kind of try to fit what has been natural for podcasts and kind of tried to fit that to music.
There is some overlap, there is a lot of overlap in fact, but some of the things are not as naturally mapped from one spot from one space to another one.
For example, we have this idea of music singles, which is probably the dominant way in which artists nowadays release music.
It's like the 1950s all over again, everybody's doing singles.
Yeah, and in RSS, we mostly have this idea that there is a set of items that are distributed together.
Usually what we do in this music world in RSS, we typically see an RSS feed as a set of songs in an album.
But now if most people release music in a form of singles, how do you do that? Do you have 100 RSS feeds?
How do you actually demonstrate your fans that, oh, I actually own this and that feed?
How do you actually make these kind of recommendations on podcast players, on music players, which have to somehow understand that if a listener listens to song A of some artist, they may want to listen to song B.
And it doesn't ask straightforward in these kind of open standards.
Because in theory, anyone could claim to be some artist and claim that the music they upload belongs to that specific artist.
So we still have a lot of to do in that space to essentially make RSS a lot more natural for music artists.
And it's so, so useful to now have a lot more artists in this space because they actually tell you, you know, this doesn't make sense.
Why are we doing it this way and maybe we should change things?
So I feel this space is going to mature a lot more in the next few months.
Yeah, Mitch, what do you see? What's next for music broadcasts and with respect to podcasting?
Well, what's happening right now, which I think is really exciting is people have been calling it music casts.
I'm not sure if that term sticks around, but that is what people are calling it.
And so there's a show Adam has the most popular one right now. Adam Curry, the boost to Graham ball.
And it's basically bringing back DJing, I think, into relevance and making it interesting again.
So using, it could be, I say podcast app, but it really can be any app using an app.
You can listen to boost to Graham ball.
And as he plays, maybe 10 songs over the course of an hour or so, as that, you're listening to that song, you can automatically send value or Bitcoin to that artist.
So Adam might take 10% of the value because he's the DJ and 90% of the value goes to that artist.
And then when a new track plays, it starts, the app starts streaming value to the new track artist.
Beyond that, you can, we have a feature in podverse where if when a song comes on, you can hit save.
There's a heart button for it.
Tap my microphone.
There's a heart button that you can press and it'll automatically save that track to your playlist.
So we're trying to bring that the convenient user experience people are used to and just a music platform,
except with this entirely new feature that doesn't exist anywhere else, which is the ability to send value to different tracks over the course of a broadcast.
And I think this creates a new paradigm and like, it's more interesting to me to hear music that's recommended from a DJ like,
and I've lacked that in my life since the 90s basically DJs have disappeared completely but replaced by robots literally.
Yeah, I grew up listening to KBCO 97.3 out of Boulder.
And they're one of the best independent stations in the country.
They'd go from like, Lyle Loveitt to counting crows to crowded house to blues traveler.
Like they'd just span the gamut, you know, then you go to like, from Melissa Etheridge to spin doctors.
And it was based upon the DJ's music preference and the musical director's music preference, not what corporate is handing down
and telling Ryan Seacrest, he has to play on I Hard Radio, you know, it's the industry has become so homogenized that you don't have that personal recommendation anymore, you know.
And another point that I'll bring up that I've mentioned several times on different podcasts is that I'm fully convinced there's a band in the UK,
there's a band in Michigan that has recorded the next white album, the next Led Zeppelin 4.
And we'll never hear it, you know, because there's so much noise out there and there's no radio is dying.
So hopefully this can, hopefully this can bring, you know, help help bring this back.
I mean, there's a lot of, there's a lot of poor quality artists out there, you know, because there's no barrier to entry into this industry.
But there's also a lot of amazing stuff out there, man, like, I mean, I say Michigan, because there's a band up there called Touch the Clubs that I absolutely love and I'm trying to bring this and trying to bring them into this space.
I say UK, because there's a band out of East London, South London on seat called the trusted, they are, they're like cold play in YouTube from 20 years ago, and these kids are just, they can awesome.
And I'm trying to bring them into the space, but I digress.
I can talk about that for hours.
If I could add to that, I've been shocked by the quality of music that's already available with podcasting 2.0.
I think, I mean, there's over like 1,500 artists or something and just stumbling through things I've found really high quality.
And this paradigm helps artists who may have smaller audiences and we break down the economics of it. Let's say you are on Spotify and the estimates I've seen online is that they pay 0.003 cents per listen.
If you're lucky with if blitz, right without splits.
Yeah, they don't do any of that great stuff, but if you have 5,000 listen that might be pretty good for your reach as an artist, but you'll get paid nothing basically.
With value for value and podcasting 2.0, people typically set them out.
They send per listen much higher than 0.003 cents.
So if you have a smaller but more engaged audience, people who love your music and want to support you directly, you'll get a much higher value per listen with the value for value model than anything these big tech platforms can offer artists who have smaller audiences.
Yeah, amen.
I mean, 1,000 true that's the business model of 1,000 true fans. Right? I mean, you got 1,000 true fans and they all contribute on a yearly basis to help you make 80 to 100 grand a year. Damn, that's, that's a good living.
That's a good living, you know, Mitch, you guys, I love your app and you guys seem to be leading the space. And by the way, I love RSS blue too.
Don't take that personally.
Don't be not as the host for this, you know, his company is the hosting platform for the show, but we rely on each other.
Yeah, we work together. Yeah, you guys seem to be leading the pack, but Mitch, you know, I know you guys are behind the scenes on testing these live streams coming up for the shows in Minneapolis with Ainsley Castello and just loud.
How, how are you guys approaching development on your app? Like what, what's next for you guys?
Well, relentlessly working on it is part of the, the secret, just no shortcuts. I just work on it constantly.
I actually quit my day job a couple of months ago, living on savings is not paying for itself yet.
So, yeah, I'm constantly working out, but we've also as an open source project, we have many contributors at this point and 2.0 has helped us get in touch with a lot of people.
Just some names I could throw out.
And as our other co-founder, Steven B. Alex Gates, Steven Crater, Archie, he has helped rebuild our whole infrastructure and many more contributors.
So we're open source, we're a collaboration. Some people just love the fact that that's, you know, we offer that and there aren't many options.
We'll even or not that have as many features as we do in the podcasting and music space.
And as for where the future is going, we have many, you know, it's dated from week to week to be honest as we, you know, new things are possible in 2.0.
The focus for the near term is structural improvements so we can scale up, which may not be very exciting for, you know, not something a feature you can really touch.
We want to iron out our live experience, also improve the video experience is a big one. We have video working on web and mobile, but there are, if you use it, you'll see it's like, you may want to smooth out the experience a bit, but it will work.
Yeah, do I want to talk to you about licensing really quick? You know, I know you and I have had a lot of conversations behind the scenes about licensing for musicians in this space and Mitch will continue on this one as well.
But what concerns do you have about music licensing in this space?
I guess I'm afraid that, you know, it might be too late when something bad happens in the space for us to kind of adopt some of these things.
So I think we have to think about licensing and events.
At the moment, although there is a standard, for example, for including licenses in RSS feeds, it's not widely supported.
And again, in the case of the law, there probably has to be a president of how these things are essentially interpreted.
You know, just because you put a certain string in your RSS feed, does that automatically make it obvious to everyone what he actually mean by that?
Does that apply to the text document? Does that apply to the audio files within that RSS feed and so on?
So I think we really need to think very hard about how to actually use licensing in the specific case of any kind of audio really in RSS feeds, which in theory ideally can be distributed very widely across all of these apps.
For the start, we probably want to start with something simple with things like creative commas licenses, which would permit the use of, let's say, music in the most open way, and they would be the easiest to essentially interpret for all the parties.
But the next a lot of artists might actually want maybe slightly more restrictive licenses, for example, they might only want to allow to play their music only on apps that actually support things like value for value, this idea that you can play directly from the app.
Yeah, the exchange of value.
Yeah, exactly because if your app doesn't support these direct payments, there is a lot less value for the artist.
It might only be just this idea of spreading your music and maybe gaining additional followers, but that's already what Spotify and other platforms do.
So maybe artists want to tell the platforms, the apps that consume their content that they should have a minimum set of requirements, minimum set of features that they should support before ingesting their feeds.
Yeah, Mitch, what are your thoughts on licensing in this space and the challenges of it?
Well, if you're putting your music in an RSS feed these days, there is at least in the United States, laws different all across the world.
So licensing is a very complicated question.
But there's an implicit agreement that if you are sharing your content in an open way in an RSS feed that apps can consume it.
And if it turns out there is some sort of copyright violation, then it is on those apps to act in a responsible and prompt way to remove that content.
That's just the way the MCA strikes work as I understand.
So in the case of podverse, we're only interested, we want to comply with US law.
We're not so radical, we're trying to defy the whole institution as an RK.
That would probably be expensive and distract us from making technological progress.
But at this point, it's not a problem we've encountered if we do encounter it.
If, for example, a DJ is playing music that is not licensed and we receive a takedown notice, we'll look into it and we'll have to remove it.
But this is especially good at this juncture for people who are independent artists who don't, you know, if you want to put your music on out and you want it to reach the largest possible audience in the simplest way, RSS is the way to go with that.
Where there is that exchange for value, right? Like if I, if I'm playing just loud at Joe Martin or Amber Swini on the fan of power music hour, the exchange of value, the opportunity for exchange of value exists because it's being played on podverse, you know, the opportunity to boost that artist directly.
Now let's say the Phantom Power Music Hour is being played at the program super market right down the street while Dobby Doss is running around getting his groceries, but there's no way.
For, for to have that exchange of value, that might, excuse me, that might be a loophole in that, right? Because as we get to more radio shows, if the Phantom Power Music Hour becomes the Casey K, some top 100, you know, popularity, you know, then that might be an issue there of like if, if stores or commercial places are, and I see you both nodding your head,
and then the stores or commercial places broadcast that show, but there's no way to, to have that exchange of value in a commercial setting.
Well, that goes exactly to what Dobby Doss is saying about how there are ways to, we could just embed license, you know, tags in an RSS feed, and that declares what your terms are as an artist, if you want it to be played in grocery stores without value enabled, there could be a license for that.
Now, whether people comply or not, that becomes a legal matter at a later stage, but in our case, we're just going to play all the content where license to be able to play.
Yeah, and I don't know if the creative commons license works in that regard. I mean, I dove through them and I might be mistaken, but it looks like some of them are non revocable, right?
Like, I mean, if, if Ainsik Estella were to put a, a creative commons non revocable license on cherry on top, you know, she can't take it back.
You know, I mean, you guys are both nodding your heads when I'm assuming I'm correct.
I don't actually know.
You're not in your head and see us. It's the same as with most code, you know, once you attach a license to code or, you know, any kind of form of content, the content at that point in time, whether that would be code or music can be distributed under the terms of that license, unless it's specifically, unless the license specifically states that, you know,
the terms can actually be changed in the future. So if what the artist wants is more control over their music, creative commons is probably not the way to go and we need something different.
And that's going to be very important because, you know, the music, you know, if the artist, do get paid at all, large part of it actually comes from their music, their music being played in public places.
So we definitely don't want them to lose that money.
Let me ask you guys too. I mean, as we, I mean, thank you guys for taking the time out of the day. I mean, Mitch, I know this is pretty much quote unquote, your lunch hour and polvidatsu. You should probably be eating dinner right amount now.
So I appreciate you two fellows for coming on and joining.
I, I have never been more excited for independent musicians than I am now because of Bitcoin and value for value and podcasts.
I think it's just, it's, we're going to see the golden age of music come back again. You know, I mean, that's a terrible.
I should edit that because that's really poorly explained, but I think we're going to see another golden age of music soon because of all of this.
As we wrap this up, what like, Mitch, if you had two minutes with a band and you were going to try and pitch them on guys, you got to get your stuff in Bitcoin and value for value and RSS podcasts.
If you had two minutes, what would you tell this band?
Tell them it's the easiest way for you to distribute your content everywhere. It gives you a home base. Your RSS feed is the, you can upload it potentially to any other platform.
It's a way you can own that home base for your music. And that there is, it's, it's another way to connect with your audience, not only to bring in money through value for value, but to bring it in in a way that has like a direct human connection attached to it.
The fact that you can send messages with your money to artists introduces an element. There's a human connection there and it's something it's not just a comment that some random bot can leave.
It's, you know, there's some value attached to it. So you know, it's real.
I think it can build closeness with your audience and also expand your reach as an artist.
Yeah, for sure. Dove does. If you had two minutes with a band and you're like, guys, you got to do this man.
What's your pitch, dude? What we've got?
Yeah, if I had two minutes, I would just call Mitch and ask him to explain things.
But seriously, I would probably just stress this point of not having to trust any kind of platform or
any kind of person for you to be able to make money.
If you go into this artist's world where you can distribute content in an open way, where you can tell in your feed how you want to be paid, you don't really have to trust anyone.
Because as long as there are apps like podverse, fountain, podcast guru, which actually use these standards, you don't have to trust that someone is not going to pay you because you know that if you have listeners that love your music, you will get that value back.
Yeah, lovely, lovely. I mean, you kind of let the market decide.
You know, if the songs aren't great, people aren't going to pitch in. But man, if you got something to say, then speaks from the heart and it connects with people.
This is a great opportunity to make a side income. That's what I'm telling everybody.
Like, don't, you know, I'm not telling you to not deal in Spotify. I'm not telling you to avoid TikTok and all this other stuff.
Like just add this into your business plan. You as an independent musician, whether you like it or not, you are a small business owner.
And this, you need to incorporate putting your music up into the RSS world as part of your business plan because it will create a side revenue for you.
Now, what you do with that Bitcoin is up to you. It could like just start and it could change your life in 20 years or if you want to go out and buy a piano, go buy a piano.
But you should do this as I tell people, do this to create an additional revenue stream.
Number one, and number two, you are going to find a boatload of fans out there that you'd never need to have because you'd be an early adopter.
And this space is dying for great music. That's my, that's my pitch.
Yeah. And being an early adopter will have its own benefits here because like I said, there's over a thousand artists that are sharing their music right now.
But you could also say there's only 1000 and you can stand out more by being early.
And we're already, there's, I don't know how many music casters are. There's like close to 10 or something.
People are creating them quickly. Like this just emerged the past couple of months. And they're looking for music to feature.
And they're going to do the legwork of promoting it on social media.
You know, if they like this song, they're going to help reach the audience. And you know, you're not going to find that on the radio for the vast majority of musicians.
If anybody's even listening to the radio or you may not get the benefits of the Spotify algorithm and their paid promotions and however content gets in there.
So by being an early adopter here, that will have benefits as well.
Yeah.
Yeah. I will tell you that for all you musicians who are listening about getting your music in here, I have two music broadcasts that I do.
Phantom Power review where I kind of dive into the theory and the composition of the songs. And I talk about why I like them. And then I do a top 10 show where I take 10 songs and I put them up.
Now, two things. Number one, I'm dying for quality music. Like I'm out there scouring, wave lake and Ellen Beech's and everything else every day looking for songs that speak to me. And I can't find them.
That is why I have not been putting my shows out in a consistent basis. Those two music shows, but that will happen in time because more and more people are coming into the space.
And the other thing that I will say is that myself and all these other V4V jockeys as we call ourselves.
We're all talking to each other and telegram on the back end. And we're all like, who's got new tunes? Who's got new tunes?
Like Sir Lebray out of Tacoma. He does a kick ass metal show. He's always looking for metal. And if one of us runs across a metal act, we send it over to him. Like we're all talking to each other behind the scenes to help each other out.
So yeah, I don't know where I was going with that originally.
It shows our age maybe, but it reminds me of the days where people were passing around cassette tapes and CDs.
Yeah, man.
You know, it's like you curating music for each other is becoming relevant again. It's not just auto play, Spotify, algorithm or whatever.
It's putting a human element into it.
That's right. That's a good way of thinking about it.
This is like doing a mix tape for your girl for that girl. You had a crush on, right?
Yeah. Damn.
You could send money in the program.
There's a show there, Dolvier. There's a show there. Like mix tape for your girlfriend or something like that.
Like there's a show there. That's funny because I mean, my buddies did that all the time.
Like when you had a crush on a girl, you'd make a, you'd make a CD for a tape for something.
All right. That's, I'm, and that now I'm showing my age. Hell, I'm older than you.
All right. Well, listen, thank you guys so much for joining. Is there anything else you guys want to add about, about RSS or podcasting 2.0 or your time with Adam or anything like that?
Anything else you guys want to throw in?
I'll just say, I mean, I'm hooked on it. I love it. It's awesome. There's such a supportive community.
It's very exciting. If anybody is interested, there's podcast index dot social where you can pretty much reach everybody that's active in the community.
Everybody's supportive. There's just, if you have questions, go there and somebody will answer it.
Feel free to tag myself @mitch on that platform if you're not getting a reply. Yeah. And check out podverse. It's a good app, man.
All the platforms.
Yep.
Do you have anything else?
Yeah, I'll just repeat that this community is just amazing in how helpful it is.
So always feel free to essentially drop us a message if you have any questions. If you want, you can email info@rssblue.com.
With any questions you have, even if you don't want to host at RSS Blue, I'm always happy just to talk to you to explain what's this music business in RSS is all about.
And what's the best way for you to either upload your own music or to host your own music show?
Well, thank you guys and I'll just reiterate again just how welcoming the community is and we're all here to help each other out and push the ball forward.
It's going to be an exciting couple of years and hopefully I'll get a chance to see you both in person next year.
So, I'm going forward to it. Absolutely. Love to.
All right. Thanks guys. Appreciate your help on this. Have a great afternoon.
Thank you.
So there you have it. There's two really smart dudes.
Davidas from RSS Blue and Mitch from Podverse. I can't thank them enough for coming on board and helping me out with this discussion today.
Davidas has just been amazing behind the scenes. I pepper that dude with so many questions and he just breaks it down beautifully every time.
And Mitch, that was actually the first time that I had spoken to Mitch in person but he has been instrumental in helping out all of these developers and everybody behind the scenes making sure that this lighting enabled, Bitcoin enabled, value for value event that is happening in Minneapolis next week is going to go off without a hitch.
So thanks to both those fellows for jumping in on the conversation today and teaching us all about RSS and I would encourage any musician that was listening to this.
Scroll back because the contact information is going to pop up on your phone on the app.
Reach out to those guys. They'll get back to you. They'll answer your questions. They're good dudes.
Just about everybody in the space that I've reached out to has gotten back to me. This is a great community of people and they want to see more musicians in it and more importantly they want to see a succeed because the more musicians that we bring into this space, the more Bitcoin adoption we're going to have and the better it's going to be for all these musicians out there.
Thank you guys very much for listening. Looking forward to the next Business Hour podcast. It will probably be a couple weeks after I get through the holidays.
But we'll be bringing up some Noster folks and we'll be looking for some more industry professionals to answer the questions that are burning in the hearts of musicians around the country.
Cool? Cool. Thanks for listening guys. Don't forget to smile for the mug shot. See ya.
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